Name Analysis

The service for name-analysis includes the functionality of the products provided by Uniserv for the analysis of name lines as well as for the verification and repositioning of the name items of an address.

Name analysis vs. name verification

There are two different approaches to examining names:

Analysis of unstructured data - analyse_name request that analyzes and repositions name items.
Verification of input data that is already available in structured form- verifyname request. This refers to data with an implicit knowledge of the type and structure of names. This knowledge is represented by the structure of the input data.

The name analysis with analyse_name, however, discards this knowledge and restructures the input data - based on its own ruleset. In the case of unstructured input data, this procedure always improves the quality of the data. Structured input data, however, are not always improved by this procedure.

analyse_name is not able to use the data comprised in the input data structure, even though such a structure is a quality characteristic in itself. This has a negative effect on the quality of the data, especially if the information is complex or ambiguous.

verifyname closes this gap: Each name item is passed separately to the program and evaluated individually. For example, a given name input is verified in order to find out if it really contains a given name. Additionally, the gender can be verified or assigned. And wrongly positioned input data detected is shifted to the correct field. With this approach, the data quality can be improved by taking the predefined structure into account.